Exhibiting excellence as individual CSMs in retention and expansion

For the remainder of this chapter, I’m going to focus on what it can mean for an individual CSM to develop personal strategies to support the company’s overall strategy for driving customer retention and growth. In so doing, because the overall strategy is so central to the company’s future, CSMs are presented with tremendous opportunities to make a real business impact that is both visible and discreet.

Let’s zero in on why retention is so critical for companies, especially SaaS companies, which are reliant on subscription models. Because it’s expensive to land customers (expressed by the metric customer acquisition cost (CAC)) and it is typically associated with sales and marketing expenses, it’s imperative that those costs are recouped over time. If not, in theory, a company that has out-of-control churn will find itself quickly on a trajectory toward going out of business...